Crafting Meaningful Play: Care and Meaning Making in/as/of/through Games

Meaningful play has served as a useful analytic category for game design researchers. Drawing on Huizinga, who asserted that, "[a]ll play means something," (Huizinga, 1955, p. 1) Salen and Zimmerman set out to construct a productive framework for what they deemed, "meaningful play" (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004, pp. 31-36). In their mobilization of meaningful play, Salen and Zimmerman outline a framework for evaluating "successful game design [as] the creation of meaningful play" (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004, p. 33). The framework advanced includes two vectors for thinking about meaningful play. The first, the define as "discernible," meaning that a player's actions result in an identifiable shift in the underlying systems of a game. Players need to be able to recognize that their actions have identifiable effects. The second is "integration," meaning that actions ought to be larger than simple action/reaction. Put another way, actions should also "affect[s] the play experience at a later point in the game" (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004, p. 35). They also recognize that meaningful play will undoubtedly exceed even the formal systems of a game, that often meaningful play occurs in and around games.